


Independent Materia: A User's Catalogue

by bookoftheazuresky



Series: Mastered Materia: A Collector's Catalogue [5]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Magic, Materia, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-11-22
Packaged: 2020-06-22 06:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19661740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookoftheazuresky/pseuds/bookoftheazuresky
Summary: Purple materia for boosts.Mini fic for the main characters of FFVII, one for each materia.





	1. Cover: Cloud

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to meadowlarked for the beta!

Cloud is SOLDIER. He’s faster, tougher than any of AVALANCHE. A couple of hours is all it takes for bruises fade from his skin. He’s taken a bullet to the calf and walked it off. In fact, it’s his _preferred_ method of treatment.

So it makes sense to throw himself in front of Tifa, wild shots ringing against the flat of his sword. One punches into his shoulder and lodges itself in the joint. Barret yells and looses a volley of his own, sending Shinra troopers scattering.

“Cloud!” Tifa says, grabbing onto his shoulder- not, fortunately, the one that’s bleeding. “Gaia, Cloud, you didn’t need to do that!” She hastily uncaps a potion and waves it under his nose. The chalk-herbal-carbonation scent in combination with the throb in his arm turns his stomach and he resists the urge to snarl at her.

“It’s fine,” Cloud snaps instead. “Just leave it alone.”

Tifa’s near-red eyes narrow, and Cloud leans back before he can think the better of it, a reflex earned when he was a scrawny brat with long hair. “It’s nothing for a SOLDIER,” he says rather than crumble at her whim like he was a kid again.

“Yeah, but I’m sure _SOLDIERS_ learn that it’s better teamwork if everyone is in good health,” Tifa says pointedly, brandishing the potion again.

It’s hard to hold his sword with one arm hanging uselessly, so Cloud, surly, finally accepts the phial. The taste makes him half-gag.

“Don’t jump in front of me again,” Tifa orders him when he’s finished.

Cloud gets a flash-memory of dark wool against his cheek, pauldrons pressing against his skull as he was enfolded in strong arms, and shakes it away. “Yeah, yeah.”


	2. Chocobo Lure: Cloud

It’s funny. Cloud’s never really fit in anywhere: not in Nibelheim, not in Shinra, and not really in this batch of misfits chasing along after a man in a black cloak.

Spending the night in the back-of-the-barn rooms that the chocobo farmers kept for people who stabled their birds was…nice. Cloud has never done well with cars or planes, but it seems that he’s a natural on the back of a chocobo. Jokes about his hair aside, the birds _like_ him, wanting to be petted and told how good and beautiful they are. And they _are._ Even the smell doesn’t bother him much.

Cloud imagines for a minute what it would have been like not going to Midgar and SOLDIER when he left Nibelheim, but somewhere like here. A breeder, or a jockey, or something like that. Plenty of people out in the world still use chocobos to travel, since most monsters avoid them. It’s not glamorous like SOLDIER, but look where that’s gotten him.


	3. Long Range: Yuffie

Despite her young age, Yuffie is no stranger to having blood under her nails. Wutai is a _conquered_ _nation_ , after all. Wutaians are sub-human, and plenty of people thought they could do as they pleased simply because they were Shinra and Wutai was pacified. Cowed.

Yuffie is neither. Before she’d ever come to the eastern continent, she’d stalked her prey in the back streets of Wutai’s capital. Sometimes her victims had woken up with headaches and empty pockets. Sometimes, they hadn’t woken up at all.

Those ones she had known by the greedy light in their eyes when they took in her small frame and cute face, when they let her get much too close, close enough to palm a knife. Yuffie knows how to count ribs and slip her blade in between, how to cut a throat from behind. She doubted Vincent could do better.

No, Yuffie might be a better fighter when she’s got room to move and throw her weapons, but she’s more than familiar with close-range combat.


	4. Counterattack: Cid

An old joke: what do you call someone with a Counter materia but no potions?

Answer: dead.

It’s closer to the truth than Cid would like. Counter needed the enemy to get a good blow in to activate. Still, if he had to get hit, he might as well make them bleed for it too.


	5. Enemy Lure: Cait Sith

Cait Sith is the best kind of bait: the loud, obvious distraction. No one, upon seeing it, would think that not only is it a Shinra pawn, but run by the serious, dedicated Reeve Tuesti.

That’s a large part of Cait Sith’s personality programming too. A fortune-telling cat with an accent, riding a moogle plush? In what world would _that_ work for Shinra?


	6. Speed Plus: Barret

Barret knows he isn’t fast. _Fast_ isn’t desirable in a coal miner, _precise_ is. When you could bring down the ceiling with a misaimed swing of your tools, being sure of where you were aiming was considerably more important, and that had carried over to his choice of weapon. Guns required aim.

Still, when running for his life from Shinra, he can’t help but wish he had Tifa or Cloud’s effortless, ground-eating lope. At least Aeris is back here panting with him.


	7. MP Plus: Aerith

The things they don’t tell you about being the designated healer, Aeris thinks uncharitably, could fill a _book._ Oh, sure, she’s got the affinity for the Cure materia. But does she have the situational awareness to keep an eye on all of the party and tell who needs a boost? Not really.

But she does have the deepest reserves besides Cloud, and that means that the both of them get to play ambulance. She’s sometimes tempted to pawn the whole thing off on him, honestly. Except that Cloud can swing a sword and Aeris is stuck behind him with a staff and materia.

Well, if she wants to keep up, she needs to get better with either magic or punching people. And the rest of the team seems to have the punching down, so magic it is.


	8. HP Plus: Tif

Tifa used to climb mountains Before. She was the best of Nibelheim’s guides, the one recommended to travelers on the lower slopes, the one who raked in the gil during summer when she led groups up Mount Nibel to see the best views. It took strength and stamina, and most of all it took _breath._

But now Tifa has a scar on her chest, her back. It’s the width of her hand, pale and sharp. It’s where Sephiroth ran her through with the Masamune, charging up the stairs of the Nibelheim reactor to save her father. It’s the outward sign of the damage to her lung, a kill-stroke performed by Shinra’s Silver General.

She still had the strength and the stamina, but she would never breathe deeply again without feeling the faint catch that injury had left her with. Tifa tries not to wonder if she could still climb like she used to Before.


	9. Luck Plus: Yuffie

The bangle around Yuffie’s wrist cracked, finally giving up the ghost. She caught the purple materia that dropped out of the broken slot with half a yelp, making Tifa glance in her direction.

Yuffie glared down at the split. It had been looking under the weather for days, ever since the tumble down the stairs of the Shinra cargo ship fighting that tentacle thing. She’d broken her wrist on the unforgiving steel grating, and bruised her arm from wrist to elbow. She was lucky it hadn’t been her neck, honestly. Yuffie had seen what bouncing down a twenty-foot staircase could do to people, and that was without the possibility of freefall down into the cargo bay if the safety railing hadn’t caught her.

“Tifa, we’ve got some spare bangles, right? I need a replacement.”


	10. Magic Plus: Vincent

Funnily enough, Vincent hadn’t used much magic materia in his former career as a Turk. Oh, he’d kept the default Fire slotted into his standard-issue gun, but it had certainly never taken up any slots in his rifles. Those were for yellow materia: Deathblow and Sense, usually. Mostly he’d relied on practice engraved into bone and his peerless eyesight and judgment.

Cloud had never really inquired into Vincent’s materia skills. He’d decided that the party needed a backup healer and magic user, someone to run crowd control, and Vincent had become it. Vincent supposed it was something of his own fault, since he’d certainly never volunteered any information on his aptitudes. Then again, his experience as a Turk was mostly solo, not as part of a party, so he’d have been playing catch-up anyway.

Vincent finds that he likes it, anyway. It’s just another way in which running with AVALANCHE is different than working for Shinra.


	11. Gil Plus: Yuffie

People don’t take Yuffie seriously. She’s either too much or not enough- too loud, not princess enough; too bold, not cunning enough; too talented, not old enough. Even her father, who shows only Wutai’s bright silks and glossy paint to the foreign Shinra barbarians, doesn’t recognize that she is only copying the lesson that she learned from him: once people think they know something, they don’t look underneath.

“Sorry, sorry,” Yuffie says brightly to the Shinra grunt she walked into. He takes her in: small, Wutaian, smiling cheerily, and scoffs, striding off like he has important things to do. Yuffie tucks his wallet into her back pocket, her smile not changing a hair.


	12. Preemptive: Vincent

A tickle down the back of his neck. Turk paranoia, ground into his bones early and hard, has Vincent caressing the grip of Death Penalty. The others don’t move, hard asleep in their bedrolls after the long day.

Something moves beyond the light of the fire, long and serpentine and silent. Vincent’s scarlet eyes track the motions with unnatural keenness, reflecting the light back like a predator’s.

The shadow pauses, then withdraws away from the camp without a sound. Vincent keeps a wary eye on it, but settles back down for the long night watch.


	13. Experience Plus: Yuffie

Yuffie never quite forgets that she’s the youngest of them, that for all her training as a ninja, these people have skills and pasts she could never replicate. She’s not Aeris or Red XIII to hear the cries of the planet like it’s a person. She’s not Tifa, who can rip the wings off a thunderbird and turn it into a dinner roast, or Cid, who can put his hands on the controls of a car, boat, or plane and make it dance, or Barret, who can charge through ranks of Shinra troopers like it’s nothing. She’s not Cloud or Vincent, beyond human in so many ways, small and large. (And she’s definitely not a robotic cat or his Shinra defector puppetmaster).

She can’t be them.

But she can soak it all in; she can ask Aeris about the Lifestream, talk to Red XIII about enemy skills. She can take cooking lessons from Tifa and stare up at the stars while Cid gruffly points out the constellations and get tips for working at range from Barret. She can listen to Cloud’s surprisingly absorbing opinions on chocobo breeding and learn running landings from Vincent. (She can talk, with surprising frankness, about plans for decommissioning the Wutai reactor with Reeve. He’s not so bad.)

Maybe she can’t be any of the others, but the Yuffie that she’s becoming will be the better for meeting them.


	14. Enemy Away: Vincent

For the most part, monsters are predators. And predators, Vincent knows, are essentially lazy. Or perhaps a better word was _efficient_. They moved around as little as possible to conserve energy. They avoided attacking creatures they thought were stronger, because they couldn’t afford to be wounded themselves. Threat displays were far more common from monsters than actual combat.

And these days, Vincent was far closer to a monster than a human. A baring of fangs, a warning shot, and most creatures would slink away rather than fight. Vincent had the feeling that if he were on the front lines, monsters would be even more reluctant to attack.

Undoubtedly useful though it was, Vincent wasn’t so eager to sacrifice the remaining bits of his personhood on the altar of expediency that he would suggest it.


	15. HP <> MP: Barret

Barret lived around Corel all his life, but he’d never explored all the little nooks and crannies that mark the landscape. The place was covered in caves, ravines, and sinkholes; kids were told to stay close, not venture far from town unless they wanted to end up in the bottom of a hole and die from lack of water. Little Jen, Myra’s best friend, hadn’t listened- they’d found her body two years later in a crevice, the bones of her skeletal leg still wedged together from the stone.

Even so, some of the caves near the river had captured the imagination of local storytellers. It’s probably the difference in the stone, bedrock peeping through the layers of softer material. How did caves come to be made out of granite bedrock, anyway? Still, you’d need a black chocobo or some high tech to get over there, and Corel had neither, so they remained a mystery.


	16. Mega All: Barret

Barret regretted not having two hands at times like this. The Northern Crater was all down, down, down; terrifying drops should you miss one hand- or foothold included. Cloud, Vincent, Cait Sith- none of them had trouble with the insane drops into what looks like pitch black nothingness, but Barret did. And the jumps across rivers of raw Lifestream were even worse. Barret did not _want_ mako poisoning, thanks. He saw what that shit did to Cloud.

Cloud and Vincent glanced back at him with thoughtful expressions from their inspection of the latest deadly gap.

“Barret,” the kid said, “I don’t think you can make this one.”

“No kidding,” Barret told him.

“I believe I can boost you the difference, but it will be unpleasant,” Vincent volunteered, looking at the gap again.

“Don’ have much choice,” Barret conceded, looking at the platform on the other side, the jagged looking stone.

A little more conferring, and Cloud and Cait made the jump with envious ease, then cleared the landing area for him. Cait had already pulled out a potion. He wanted to say the doll was alarmist, but he probably _was_ gonna scrape his arms open when he hit.

Vincent knelt, cape pooling around him. He eyed the platform over his shoulder, adjusted his angle, and then dropped his hands into a stirrup. “When you’re ready.”

Barret nodded, nerved himself against the green glow so far below, and ran.

The landing was as bad as he’d thought. Rocks tore open his flesh arm and struck sparks from his gun. Then the rocks beneath him seemed to _lurch_ , and Barret thought for a terrifying instant that the whole platform was going to collapse out from under him.

It didn’t though, and an instant later Cait was pouring the potion over his arm in a splash of soothing warmth. Cloud checked him over for other injuries or damage to his gun arm- just what they needed at the bottom of the world with Cid off with the girls.

“Congrats, you’re not dead,” Cloud told him, sitting back and shaking what dust he could off of his hands.

He grunted at Cloud and made his own inspection. A shift of his weight made the stone beneath them grate and the whole party, including the newly arrived Vincent, stiffened.

It was only a single layer that had broken off, though. Barret eased off of it and it slipped aside, a frozen wave that had cracked under his ungraceful landing. A dust-covered glint of purple crystals was revealed.

“We’re gonna have more materia than we know what to do with by the time we get all the way down,” Barret said, sorting through the fragments until he found the smooth orb at the heart of the crystal growth.


	17. Underwater: Cid

“The hell?” Cid said around a mouthful of cigarette. He scowled down at the deep purple materia. “People ain’t supposed to breathe water. ‘s’not right.”

Cloud gave him a deadpan look. “You were the one trying to get out into space. I don’t think it gets less natural than that,” the blond pointed out, then thrust his hand under Cid’s nose. “You’re _going_ to equip it,” Cloud said, the look in his eyes as stubborn as a mountain.

Well, Cid could be pretty stubborn too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it! Thanks for reading, everybody! It was a long road, but my goal has finally been completed.


End file.
